Trump's 8 border wall prototypes cost about $400,000 each. Now they're being torn down.


Construction was completed in October of 2017 on eight wall prototypes at the border near San Diego. President Trump looked at the sample walls the following March, and now they will all be torn down.
Each prototype cost between $300,000 and $500,000, for a total bill of $2.4 to $4 million. Additional expenditures will be required to remove them now that their brief show-and-tell purpose is finished.
"There is money already allocated to either take them down or build infrastructure around them," Border Patrol Agent Theron Francisco said Friday. "But the decision has been made at the national level to take them down, and the secondary replacement project will take their place." The timeline for the prototypes' destruction has yet to be set.
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Earlier this month, Trump declared a national emergency to help obtain the billions he seeks for further border wall construction, but it is already facing legal challenge which could delay or permanently block Trump's plan from moving forward.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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